{"value"=>"<p>Begins with an A-Z file of letters between the Central Office in New York, and contacts and campus affiliates at colleges and universities, including at some black colleges in the South. The focus was on organizing black students, participation at various conferences, NSM's turn to Black Nationalism, and tangentially on Black Power and draft resistance. Correspondents included Sam Anderson, Lincoln University student and author of a paper, \"Afro-Americans and the White Radical Left\" (March 1966), and Herbert Flamer, A and T College of North Carolina student and former SNCC field secretary. Charyn Sutton, NSM communication director, is the main correspondent in these files.</p> <p>The bulk of the correspondence is filed chronologically, from 1962 to 1966, with a few name files at the end for significant correspondents like Tom Kahn and Robert Spike among others. The emphasis throughout 1962 and 1963 was on developing new tutorial projects and new NSM chapters, raising funds from campus affiliates for SNCC and NSM projects, and organizing student conferences. Peter Countryman and Sharon Jeffrey, campus coordinator and later research director, are the main correspondents in these files. Countryman wrote freely about his personal life, frustrations and politics. His May 18, 1963 letter to SDS field secretary Tom Hayden brought out some of the personal dynamics and philosophical differences between NSM and SDS. Another letter from SDS organizer Rennie Davis to Jeffrey adds a touch to the interpersonal relations between the two groups. While the two groups followed a similar trajectory until 1965, especially in their relationship with SNCC and the civil rights movement, NSM was more pragmatic and reform-oriented. Many NSM white cadres joined SDS after NSM's turn to Black Nationalism.</p> <p>Samuel Leiken, the new campus coordinator after NSM's fall 1963 reorganization, handled the bulk of the correspondence throughout 1964, with occasional input from Strickland, Jeffrey, and Field Secretaries Julian Houston and Daniel Schechter. In addition to the many requests from college campuses across the Northeast for speakers and literature on tutorials, topics of substance discussed in 1964 included recruiting volunteers for the Freedom Summer project in Mississippi, the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Delegation at the Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, and a Thanksgiving Fast for Freedom on November 19. In discussing the group's new attitude toward campus organizing, Leiken remarked that it was part of NSM's task \"to make the student aware of the real issues rather than be guided by his misinterpretations\", and called on students \"to make a lifetime commitment to a 'radical vocation'รด.</p> <p>With the shift away from tutorials in 1965 and the demise of the Harlem Action Group, the Central Office staff in New York devoted much of its energy to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's challenge to unseat the all-white Mississippi congressional delegation and to its new publication <em render=\"italic\">Freedom North</em>. Correspondents include Donald W. Jackson, former SDS member and Executive Director of the all-black New Independent Committee for Jobs, Homes and Schools, in Chester, Pennsylvania, whose advice to white SDS members in the black ghetto was: \"Pack the hell up. Get out. Go to work in your own communities....\" [See: <em render=\"italic\">The People of this Generation: the Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia</em> by Paul Lyons, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, p.49] In a March 1965 reply to Jackson, Strickland writes of his conviction that \"the movement for black unity is the only hope for this country\". The white staff remained in place, however, through the beginning of 1966. A sequence of letters to and from Frank Joyce, from mid-September to early October 1965, including a letter to the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam (published in <em render=\"italic\">Freedom North</em> as \"A Letter to the New Left\"), highlights some of the issues involved in the black-white split. By the spring of 1966 NSM is no longer involved in independent community work, <em render=\"italic\">Freedom North</em>'s publication becomes irregular, but efforts to organize black students around the theme of black unity gained momentum.</p>"}